Allan Alcorn was 24, a year out of Berkeley, when Nolan Bushnell asked him to build a ping-pong game on a television screen. Bushnell meant it as a warm-up, and told him it was for a home game that General Electric wanted. There was no such contract. “He was going to throw it away!” Alcorn said forty years later. What Alcorn built instead was Pong, the first coin-operated video game to make serious money, and he spent the rest of the 1970s running the engineering of the company it paid for.
Fast facts
- Born: 1 January 1948, in San Francisco.
- Education: electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1971.
- Atari: hired in June 1972 as the company’s first full-time engineer; later vice president of engineering.
- Games: Pong (1972), then Space Race and Gotcha.
- Consumer products: the single-chip home Pong sold through Sears for Christmas 1975; project leader at the start of the Atari VCS.
- Left Atari: in the early 1980s. Public sources give 1980, 1981 and 1983.
- Later: Cumma Technology with Bushnell, then Apple, where he became an Apple Fellow; Silicon Gaming and Zowie.
- Honours: International Video Game Hall of Fame (2011); the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences’ Pioneer Award (2015); Fellow of the Computer History Museum (2024).
Berkeley and Ampex
Alcorn grew up in San Francisco, near the corner of Haight and Ashbury. He told Retro Gamer that he was “always a nerd”: he fixed televisions from the age of 12 and paid his way through college repairing sets for local shops. He played American football for the University of California for one week, then chose electrical engineering.
In his third year at Berkeley he landed a work-study job at Ampex, the videotape company: six months at work, six months in school. There he met Bushnell, an Ampex engineer who was building a coin-operated game called Computer Space in his evenings. Alcorn and his colleagues thought Bushnell had made a terrible mistake when he left to join Nutting Associates. “If you got a job at Ampex, you worked there for life,” Alcorn said. Ralph Baer, whose Magnavox Odyssey had come out that year, noted that Alcorn had learned about synthesising video at Ampex and had worked on a TV sync generator, which is the first circuit any raster video game needs.
Pong
Bushnell and Ted Dabney hired Alcorn as their first full-time engineer in June 1972, just as they incorporated Atari. Retro Gamer counts him as employee number 3; Alcorn remembered five people in all, including “a secretary named Cynthia” and Dabney’s brother. His first job was to learn how Computer Space put moving images on a television, and then to build a ball-and-paddle game. The brief was “very general”, he said: “One spot that moves, two paddles.” Bushnell had played the table tennis game on Magnavox’s Odyssey a month earlier; the Pong entry tells that story and the lawsuit that followed.
The game has no microprocessor. Alcorn built it from about a hundred 7400-series logic chips, the ordinary building blocks of 1970s electronics, and most of what made it fun were his additions. He split each paddle into eight segments, so the ball came off at a different angle depending on where it struck. His first version had one ball speed, which “wasn’t much fun”, so he built a circuit that sped the ball up during a rally. He made the ball bounce off the top and bottom of the screen and added the sound. Ralph Baer, who always maintained that Pong was derived from his Odyssey, still counted the segmented paddle, the wall bounce and the sound as improvements on it. One feature was an accident: the paddles did not reach the top of the screen, so a good player could always win eventually by getting the ball over the other player’s bat. Without that, Alcorn said, people could have played for ever. “My motto was: if you can’t fix something, call it a feature!”
Andy Capp’s
Alcorn and Bushnell carried the prototype into Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale after work one evening, set it on a wine barrel, bought a beer and watched. The bar was on Atari’s route of pinball machines, and its owner would ring if anything broke. Alcorn’s own account, given to Retro Gamer, is plainer than the legend. About a week or ten days later the owner called to say the machine had stopped working. Alcorn went down after work, found people waiting, and opened the coin box to get a free game: it was packed with quarters, about $100, or 400 games in a week. The owner also told him that people had started coming in who did not drink beer, just to play Pong.
Other companies copied it almost at once. By Alcorn’s recollection, which he said differed from Bushnell’s, Atari shipped about 3,000 Pong machines while the copiers made 10,000 or 20,000. “But we had something that the copiers didn’t: the next game.” His own next games were Space Race, which “didn’t do very well”, and Gotcha, a maze chase inspired by a faulty Pong board whose score circuit had scattered segments all over the screen.
Vice president of engineering
As Atari grew, Bushnell took the advice of a management book and brought in outside managers to replace his founders, Alcorn among them. Alcorn’s mother was dying of cancer at the time, and he spent those three months with her. When he came back, he said, Atari was close to collapse: the banks had stopped lending and suppliers were cutting it off. Joe Keenan of Kee Games became Atari’s president and Alcorn returned as vice president of engineering. His first job was to redesign Gran Trak 10, a driving game that had been engineered so badly it would not work on location. Retro Gamer’s history of Atari says the machines came back to the factory “in droves” before Alcorn fixed it.
Home Pong
Alcorn kept a memo from Bushnell dated August 1973 listing jobs for him to do. Item six was home Pong. With Bob Brown and Harold Lee he designed a chip that held the whole game. “We had spent six months of our lives focused on making that chip work,” he told Digital Press, “and it was quite a relief when we put it into a test fixture and we powered up and it worked.” Atari had never made a custom chip before.
Selling it was harder. Alcorn and Gene Lipkin negotiated the deal with Sears, Roebuck, and Alcorn remembered demonstrating a wire-wrapped prototype, two boards of about 200 chips in a wooden box, to Sears executives in the Sears Tower. It did not work, until he realised he was using channel 3 and the station broadcasting on channel 3 had its transmitter on top of the building he was in. He retuned it in front of the vice presidents. Home Pong sold through Sears for Christmas 1975.
The VCS and the Cosmos
Alcorn was head of consumer engineering when Atari began the console that became the 2600. “Nolan, Joe and I sat around as a team and decided we needed a cartridge-based game system,” he told Retro Gamer, and he gave Steve Mayer and Ron Milner at Atari’s Cyan Engineering the go-ahead. He hired Joe Decuir to debug the prototype and bring it down to Atari, and he and Harold Lee knew Jay Miner from Miner’s work on the home Pong chip layout. “One of the best things I ever did was have on the team Jay Miner, the most brilliant silicon architect of the time,” Alcorn said.
After Warner bought Atari in 1976 and Bushnell left, Alcorn lost interest in a company that, as he saw it, was afraid to release anything that might fail. “Making lots of money is fun but it doesn’t make you go to work every day.” His last project was the Cosmos, a games machine that laid an array of LEDs over a cheap embossed hologram on each cartridge, so a space game played over a three-dimensional moon surface. Atari took it to the Consumer Electronics Show in January 1980 and, he said, took orders for about 250,000, but Warner would not market it. In December 1982 Video Games described Alcorn as one of “two continual thorns” in the side of Atari’s chief executive, Ray Kassar, being paid “handsomely to stay at home”, where he would rather fly his planes and run his trout farm in Carmel. Public sources disagree about when he formally left: the Computer History Museum says 1980, and Retro Gamer says 1983.
Cumma and Apple
Alcorn went back into games with Bushnell, at a company called Cumma Technology. Its idea was to sell games through a vending machine, the MetaWriter, which would copy a program on to a reusable cartridge, the MetaCart, in the shop. Video Games reported in May 1984 that Cumma had unveiled it at the winter Consumer Electronics Show, planned to install about 3,000 by Christmas, and expected most programs to cost about $7. It was too late. “We got the thing introduced in 1983 and the market blew up,” Alcorn said; “you couldn’t give away a videogame.”
He joined Apple and was made an Apple Fellow in 1986; a 1989 Apple chronology lists the Fellows as Alcorn, Bill Atkinson, Alan Kay and Steve Wozniak. The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences credits him with leading an Apple project that led to QuickTime and to the MPEG video format. Later he made a slot machine for Las Vegas at Silicon Gaming and interactive toys at Zowie, and in 2012 he was vice president of engineering at a mobile games start-up, uGetit. “I like puppies but I don’t like dogs,” he told Retro Gamer, explaining why he preferred small companies.
Credit
Bushnell got the public credit for Pong for years and joked that it was because he had “more access to the press”. Alcorn has never made much of it. “Nolan deserves all the credit. More than he already gets, in fact,” he told Retro Gamer in 2012. “Sure, I was the engineer, but frankly there were others that could have done the job.” The industry has credited him all the same. He was inducted into the International Video Game Hall of Fame in 2011, received the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences’ Pioneer Award at the D.I.C.E. Awards on 5 February 2015, alongside Ralph Baer, and was named a Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2024.
Sources
- Paul Drury, interview with Allan Alcorn, Retro Gamer: The Atari Book (Imagine Publishing, 2012), pp. 88–94: San Francisco and Haight-Ashbury; fixing televisions; football at Cal; Ampex work-study and Bushnell; the five staff and “employee number 3”; the GE story; the brief; ball speed and the paddle gap; Andy Capp’s, the $100 and 400 games; 3,000 machines against 10,000–20,000 copies; Space Race and Gotcha; being replaced, his mother’s illness and his return; Gran Trak 10; the August 1973 memo; the home Pong chip and the Sears Tower demonstration; Jay Miner and the VCS team; Warner and the Cosmos; Cumma; Apple, Silicon Gaming and Zowie; “Nolan deserves all the credit”.
- Retro Gamer: The Atari Book (Imagine Publishing, 2012), p. 74: Gran Trak 10 machines coming back and Alcorn’s return; Alcorn leaving Atari in 1983, becoming an Apple Fellow in 1986 and working at uGetit.
- Marty Goldberg, “Inside the Atari 2600”, Retro Gamer issue 103, June 2012, pp. 27–32: Alcorn as project leader and head of consumer engineering; the go-ahead to Mayer and Milner; hiring Joe Decuir; Alcorn and Lee and Jay Miner.
- Steve Bloom, “The incredible, incredible story of Atari”, Video Games, vol. 1 no. 3, December 1982, pp. 41–42 and 50: Alcorn as a Berkeley graduate on work-study at Ampex and Atari’s first full-time engineer; “He defined it, and I built it”; Bushnell’s “access to the press”; Alcorn and Lipkin negotiating with Sears; Alcorn and Kassar, the planes and the trout farm.
- “The making of Pong”, Edge issue 248, Christmas 2012, pp. 129–130: Alcorn joining in June 1972 aged 24; Computer Space; the warm-up exercise and the General Electric story; the eight paddle segments, the rising speed, the walls and the sound.
- Ralph H. Baer, Videogames: In the Beginning (Rolenta Press, 2005): Alcorn’s Ampex experience with video and sync generators; about 100 7400-series TTL chips; the segmented paddle, wall bounce, scoring and sound as improvements on the Odyssey.
- Digital Press issue 52, May 2003, p. 6: Alcorn on the six months spent on the home Pong chip.
- Ellen Cammeyer, “One-Stop Shopping”, Video Games, vol. 2 no. 8, May 1984, p. 10: Cumma Technology’s MetaWriter and MetaCart.
- Apple 2000 souvenir edition, 1990, p. 31, chronology entry for 23 February 1989: the Apple Fellows.
- Computer History Museum, “Allan Alcorn” (web, secondary): birth date and place, Berkeley in 1971, leaving Atari in 1980, Silicon Gaming and Zowie, the International Video Game Hall of Fame in 2011 and the 2024 Fellow award. https://computerhistory.org/profile/allan-alcorn/
- Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, “2015 Pioneers Ralph Baer and Al Alcorn” (web, secondary): the Pioneer Award at the 18th D.I.C.E. Awards on 5 February 2015; Apple, QuickTime and MPEG; uGetit. https://www.interactive.org/news/2015_pioneers_ralph_baer_and_al_alcorn_.asp